Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Someone came to me, and they were asking for advice, as they sometimes do, on what can they do to improve the long-term future? They were deciding between increasing economic growth and, say, working to prevent a nuclear war or great power war between the U.S. and China. I would almost always recommend that they work on the latter because I feel there are far fewer people who are working on that problem, so it’s substantially more neglected. What would you have to say to them? I definitely recommend people working on lowering the risk of nuclear war. One of my dissertation advisors was Thomas Schelling who, of course, is the classic theorist of nuclear war. Nuclear weapons, to me, are always the number one issue. But that said, even if you sat down and said, “I’m going to do my best to limit nuclear war,” I don’t know what that means operationally. If you’re a president or in a parliament or maybe if you had a particular nonprofit, but I’m not sure disarmament is the answer. Whereas to boost the rate of economic growth, there’s plenty that most people can do in that direction. I wish we had more good avenues for lowering the risk of nuclear war. I’d be very keen to hear about them. We’d actually be keen to support them with the Emergent Ventures fund. It seems like, given what you’re saying, that it’s likely that humans will go extinct before we manage to escape from this galaxy, or maybe even from the solar system. And that the reason for this is that, primarily, we’re going to be unable to coordinate between countries and individuals to prevent conflict that would destroy us. Your top priority would be figuring out ways to coordinate humans better, and indeed that is a really high priority for people in the effective altruism community and many people who are working with this long termist framework elsewhere. Do you think you that you might want to write a book about how to improve coordination and international cooperation in the future?…

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